Secret Lives of Children

Our years as children are often the most vulnerable, harrowing, expansive, mysterious, blissful and dangerous times we must negotiate. Whether rich with possibility or scarred by trauma, childhood offers an endless arena of exploration for writers. This issue of the lauded literary magazineConjunctions gathers fiction, poetry and memoirs by three dozen of the most innovative writers working today. One of China's foremost fiction writers, Can Xue, contributes the tale of young Sumei in "Blue Light in the Sky," a surreal vision of village life among rats and scorpions. Robert Clark's memoir "Headlong" pays bittersweet homage to his socially ambitious gay stepfather. Illustrated with photographs of family life, it is a remembrance punctuated by obsessions with washing machines, snow forts, Boy Scouts, and Socrates. "Close to Home," Joshua Furst's startlingly original fiction work, portrays a bleak foster-childhood, tracing a tremulous path from the narrator's first memory of his mother to the moment of his deepest fantasy about her. Mary Caponegro's novel excerpt, "Chinese Chocolate," narrates the strange life at a Long Island Catholic school in which nuns dwell on the "gory details" of backseat fumbling and Father Connelly bristles at a bare-assed Romeo on the big screen. Contributors include noted naturalist Diane Ackerman and novelist Paul LaFarge, among others.


Genre: Literary Fiction